Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly

Published by Touchstone

The Middlesteins meets The Virgin Suicides in this arresting family love story about the eccentric yet tightknit Simone family, coping with tragedy during 90s New York, struggling to reconnect with each other and heal.

Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves nestled in domesticity in New York, running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters as best they can: Natasha, an overachieving prodigy; sensitive Lucy, with her debilitating heart condition; and Carly, adopted from China and quietly fixated on her true origins.

With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut novelist Christine Reilly tells the unusual love story of this family. Poignant and humane, Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday is a deft exploration of the tender ties that bind families together, even as they threaten to tear them apart.

Christine Reilly

REVIEWS

AUTHOR VIDEO

FOREIGN EDITIONS

MUSIC

“Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday reveals how trouble, when visited upon a loving family, can be transformed--if imperfectly--by curiosity, empathy, and imagination. We’re in a poet’s hands; every sentence here crackles with electric vitality. This is a unique and big-hearted novel.” - Pamela Erens

"Sunday's on the Phone to Monday is a beautiful thing, the kind of a book a poet would dream a novel was." - Daniel Wallace, author of The Kings and Queens of Roam and Big Fish

"A prismatic and moving exploration of how the past can haunt, motivate, and ultimately heal us...Reilly is masterful in her illumination of the inner lives of her characters." - Mary Otis, author of Yes, Yes, Cherries

"With subtle genius and a wide-open heart, Christine Reilly invites us into a world that is at once strange and familiar. A stunning debut. - Althea Black, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely

"Deft in her characterizations...Full of imaginative anecdotes and vibrant details...Reilly's first novel is touching and nostalgic." - Publishers Weekly

Sunday's on the Phone to Monday is an energetic, captivating, and lyrical debut. Here is a writer with a wonderfully eccentric way of seeing the world, weaving a family story both whimsical and profound...Christine Reilly is a talent to watch." - Amy Shearn, author of The Mermaid of Brooklyn and How Far is the Ocean from Here

Reilly's dreamy, slipstream style dazzles. - Elle Magazine

Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday holds all the surprises here, both in character and content, not only speaking a language of its own (and tossing off some of the freshest dialogue and thought this reader has encountered in some time) but also, in what is almost a soundtrack, continuously and effectively referencing song titles of the era (with an emphasis on Bob Dylan)."
--Buffalo News

Christine Jessica Reilly lives in New York, New York. She is now involved in teaching at the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence. She formerly taught at the Dalton School. The Collegiate School, the Professional Children's School,and the Creative Center at University Settlement. She has been published in over fifty journals, including the Adirondack Review, Solo Novo, and Lifelines: Dartmouth's Medical School Journal. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University and her Master’s degree in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has published two chapbooks of poetry with small presses one entitled Too Animal, Not Enough Machine. Christine is also a former fashion model and has done commercial work for Yves St. Laurent, Elizabeth Arden, and Moroccan Oil. Sunday is on the Phone to Monday is her first novel.